Page 63 of Just Another Missing Person

“Where did you get the passport?” she asks softly, surprising him. “Work?”

“Yeah.” He looks at her now. “Dud run. Printed loads accidentally. Didn’t want to confess, so took them home.”

“So you took one—when you wanted to invent somebody?”

“Go on,” he prompts, nodding at his wrists.

“Who was it in the alley?”

“Doctored footage.”

Julia nods in understanding. “Doctored before we collected it?”

“Exactly. Changed at the source. At the hairdresser’s.”

“Nobody noticed. In the station.”

Lewis shrugs languidly. “I had help.”

“Who?”

He meets her eyes now, and Julia knows she’s about to find out more about who and how and why. “Zac’s brother,” he says.

Ah. The slow fall of understanding, like a demolition building that begins its topple long before you see it hit theground. Zac’s brother. She was both right and wrong to suspect him.

“I saw Zac—just after he confronted you, last summer. I’d gone to the station to speak to you, and I found you with Zac. He told me. And then when he died, his brother... he wanted to avenge that. His death.”

“I’m sure he did,” she says. “His brother—he wasn’t there when I interviewed people after Zac’s death?”

“No. He avoided you. Went underground.”

Lewis nods to her handcuffs again, but Julia ignores him.

His front-room window, just behind him and lit orange by a streetlamp, is littered with what look like tealight candles, and Julia remembers now a story run by a local paper—one where he obliquely accused Andrew Zamos as carefully as defamation laws would allow—saying he and his wife, Yolanda, a stoic social worker, used to light a votive candle every single night at the time Sadie went missing. Julia feels some unnameable emotion as she looks at those candles. Something intangible, some unsavory mix. Sympathy, maybe, but also revulsion, the way some people feel upon seeing tragedies, and the things humans do to deal with a catastrophic hand played to them by the universe. Some people revel in other people’s misfortunes—thank God it’s not me—and some people avoid them. Julia’s never done either, until now. Lewis’s pain, up close, is like staring at something taboo, something inhumane: a slashed wrist, a pair of gray feet in a morgue, the remains of a suicide pact. Julia’s seen them all, but never felt quite like this.

“Go on,” he says again, his voice low and jaded. Julia looks at him, a man who has lost so much he’s got nothing left, and she steps toward him.

“I don’t want to arrest you, Lewis,” Julia says thickly. Andthen she says it, the sentence she knows, somehow, he has been waiting to hear. “I should have found your daughter.”

He brings a hand to his forehead again, shielding his eyes from an imaginary sun. Julia can tell he’s crying. Perhaps he always is.

“I will find out what happened to your daughter,” she says softly.

“She’s lost,” he says, his voice as damp as the night air.

And all the anger she had felt for Lewis evaporates, there in the night, like the vapor from her judgmental words. She meets his eyes and finds herself thinking, if Genevieve disappeared, she might have done the same for her. Almost did.

And so now Julia sees him for who he is, who he really, truly is: a heartbroken parent, just like her.

30

Julia

Three o’clock in the morning, and Julia is fired up, a woman with a plan, on a mission.

She is used to running off little sleep, but she is at least usually in bed. Right now, she’s in the custody suite, surrounded by other people’s mistakes and other people’s problems as well as her own.

Julia has never liked the custody suite, always felt an uneasy truce with visiting it: a place where human rights must be carefully granted, enshrined by law, because otherwise they would be forgotten. Row after row, blue door after blue door, detainee after detainee, and behind one of them is Matthew, a kid.

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